Johnson Controls' teams kept their clients' buildings running. Financial fluency made them partners.

Johnson Controls keeps the world's largest companies running, literally. Its Global WorkPlace Solutions unit manages facilities, corporate real estate, and energy for clients whose buildings house their people and assets. Delivering on that promise puts Johnson Controls' representatives right alongside their clients, which is exactly where a gap showed up.

Technical masters, new to the business

Its people could handle almost anything technical, from heating and cooling systems to keeping a data center alive through a natural disaster. What many of them lacked was the business and financial acumen to be full partners with the clients they served. So Johnson Controls turned to Capsim to build it.

Each unique industry has an imperative metric. For Johnson Controls, it's selling and maintaining equipment to keep building costs down.Craig Watters, Ph.D., Capsim

Learning to read a client's P&L

Financial fluency was the tool. Partnership was the point.

Capsim and Johnson Controls set specific objectives: understand the financial implications of decisions across every function of a business, read financial statements and draw intelligence from them, for their own business and their competitors', and see their own strengths and weaknesses as leaders while deciding under pressure. With onsite time tight, they ran it as a hybrid: a half-day online session a week ahead let teams meet from their own desks and learn the decision tools, so the business simulation onsite, with up to 100 participants, could go straight to the hard part. Teams ran their companies, then debriefed to the room on what they'd learned and how they'd use it.

From provider to partner

The habit was what the program was really after. Embedded with a client, a Johnson Controls representative could now see the business the way the client did.

We were able to help participants, particularly those embedded with their clients, to change their perspective. They understood where and how the company's products would have the most positive impact on their clients' profit and loss statements, and could talk to their clients about the benefits in business terms, making Johnson Controls even more valuable as partners.Craig Watters, Ph.D., Capsim

The program earned outside recognition too: a BEST Award from the Association for Talent Development, which honors organizations that tie learning to business results. It rolled out across US and UK locations, and Johnson Controls adapted the simulation into a later program, a sign it had become part of how the company grows its people, not a one-off event.